Distant Voices (47 page)

However, Garrison has always been cautious about directly implicating the US government, in the form of the CIA, and agrees with the congressional committee's chief counsel who argued that the conspiracy originated in the Mafia. But he sees no logic in leaving it there. The Mafia and the CIA have long had close ties, such as in ‘Operation Mongoose', a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro using Mafia assassins. If the Mafia killed Kennedy on its own, Garrison said recently, ‘Why did the government so hastily abandon the investigation? Why did it become so eagerly the chief artist of the cover-up?'
²⁵

This and other outstanding questions are raised brilliantly by Stone. Why was Alan Dulles, head of the CIA, left virtually in charge of the Warren Commission? Why did Chief
Justice Earl Warren – whom columnist Krauthammer lauds as a ‘principled liberal' – allow himself to be so manipulated that much of the report that bears his name borders on the farcical? Take, for example, the ‘magic bullet' which managed to make a couple of U-turns on its journey from Oswald's bolt-action rifle. Why were photographs of the dead Kennedy doctored? Why did Kennedy's brain go missing after a Washington autopsy report contradicted that of the Dallas doctor who received the body and was in no doubt that Kennedy had been shot from the front? And so on.

Thousands of the 1.2 million words attacking Stone have concentrated on his portrayal of Kennedy as a ‘lost leader'. Kennedy was hardly that; but in any case, Stone devotes very little of
JFK
to his misguided admiration for Kennedy; and it is hardly relevant whether or not Kennedy was actually planning to take America out of Vietnam or to make peace with Fidel Castro. The point is, Kennedy was
perceived
in those days as a dangerous Catholic liberal who might.

I well remember the furore when Kennedy proposed using the anti-trust laws to break up the steel industry. For that alone, it was seriously suggested that he was a closet socialist. Stone has described this ‘blind hatred' of Kennedy by the far right. ‘My father hated him,' he said. ‘They hated him like they hated Franklin Roosevelt.'
²⁶

Like Stone and Garrison, the two reporters who pursued the Watergate affair were often dismissed as ‘paranoid' and ‘conspiracy-theorists'. Watergate
was
a conspiracy. The Iran-Contra scandal was a conspiracy. The ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident' was a conspiracy. The secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia was a conspiracy. The overthrow of Salvador Allende was a conspiracy. Far from requiring ‘protection' from film directors like Oliver Stone, Americans have apparently never been in any doubt about the Kennedy assassination. Year after year, more than two-thirds of those polled say they believe there was a conspiracy to kill him.
²⁷
These are the people the critics dismiss contemptuously. ‘They'll forget it by the time they reach the car park,' wrote one of them.

I don't think they will forget it. Video-leasing has helped some fine films endure, among them Stone's
Salvador
and Costa-Gavras's
Missing.
Both, like
JFK
, offered a perspective on the secret or ‘parallel' government in Washington – which, long before the Kennedy assassination, has helped to engineer the fall of numerous regimes. More recently, it ran America's illegal war against Nicaragua, and was responsible for the Iran-Contra scandals. When Colonel Oliver North was acquitted the other day on a technicality, George Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘It sounds like the system worked real well.'
²⁸

Bush has played an important part in the ‘system'. With Bush as director, the CIA intervened illegally in Angola and Jamaica, spending $10 million to get rid of Prime Minister Michael Manley, the dangerous socialist. Under Bush, a secret group called ‘Team B' doctored facts and statistics in order to exaggerate the ‘Soviet Threat'.
²⁹

Bush's friend, Robert Gates, the new director of the CIA, promises that the CIA will grow, regardless of the Soviet collapse.
³⁰
Perhaps the difference these days is that the secret government is secret no more. Bush is president; CIA men are now ambassadors; American covert operations are now overt. Whereas pilots' logs once had to be falsified, this is no longer necessary – as 200,000 dead Iraqis bear silent witness. All this is now called the ‘new world order'; and ‘preserving order' and ‘encouraging democracy' are euphemisms used every day on both big and small screens. Clearly, when
Hollywood
departs from the script, something must be done.

October 4, 1991 to May 1992

IT IS THE
second anniversary of the death of Farzad Bazoft, the
Observer
journalist hanged by Saddam Hussein for doing his job. I believe this is an important anniversary, not least as an opportunity to pay tribute to a reporter who died pursuing his craft with the kind of independence and courage that is rare. But there is much more to remember than his murder. There is the behaviour of the British Government and of much of the British press in relation to his murder, which has wider implications for free journalism.

Just before he was hanged, Bazoft told a British diplomat: ‘I was just a journalist going after a scoop.'
³¹
And quite a scoop it might have been, too. On the day Bazoft left London for Iraq, to report elections in Kurdistan, there was a huge explosion in a factory near Baghdad, where Iraq was thought to be developing missile technology. Some 700 people were reported killed.
³²
Bazoft, on the spot, did what a good reporter should have done: he headed for the site to find out what exactly had happened, and why. When he got there, he took soil samples as evidence. He was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in a kangaroo court.

Few believed Saddam Hussein would hang him; and at first the press reflected our shock and anger. Britain had to break off diplomatic relations with this ‘stupid and brutal regime', said the
Evening Standard.
‘To do less would be to suggest that there might have been some justice in taking the life of Mr Bazoft.'
³³
But this tone was to change.

Within 24 hours of the hanging, the
Sun
led the way with its ‘exclusive', headlined ‘Hanged Man Was a Robber'.
³⁴
The
facts were not in dispute; Bazoft had stolen £500 from a building society when he was a student ten years earlier. What was significant was that the story had been provided by a ‘security source': in this case, MI5 acting on behalf of the Thatcher Government, apparently seeking any excuse not to suspend its lucrative business and arms deals with Saddam Hussein.

During the 1980s Baghdad had been a favourite jaunt for Thatcher's boys. Among the unframed travel souvenirs of David Mellor, then chief secretary to the Treasury, is a photograph of himself with Saddam Hussein, their paunches extended from the comfort of the Old Torturer's sofa, with Mellor beaming at the Old Torturer himself.
³⁵
Five of his ministerial pals had sat on the same sofa.

Indeed, such was the extent of Britain's support for and complicity with Saddam Hussein that Bazoft's hanging was the gravest inconvenience. Something had to be done. He would be smeared. The
Sun, Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
relegated the hanging and featured the ten-year-old robbery.

This had the desired trigger effect. The
Mail
the next day carried the headline, ‘Bazoft “A Perfect Spy for Israel” says MP'.
³⁶
Today
refined this to ‘Bazoft “Was an Israeli Agent”'.
³⁷
The quotes were from the Tory MP Rupert Allason, who writes spy books under the name Nigel West.

That was enough to silence earlier demands for sanctions against Iraq. Those newspapers that had published allegations about Bazoft's ‘spying' now called for ‘caution' and ‘a cool head' in dealing with Iraq. A leading article in
Today
spoke for them all. ‘Withdrawing our ambassador and sending home a few students will hardly rock the Hussein regime . . .' said the paper.
³⁸
Woodrow Wyatt, who usually spoke for Thatcher, told readers of the
News of the World
: ‘It's ridiculous to reduce or cut off our trade'. His solution to the ‘whole incident' was ‘maximising trade and saying nothing more about Bazoft'.
³⁹

The smear came to a head with an infamous editorial in the
Sunday Telegraph
, which demands inclusion in journalism studies courses. For no finer example exists, not even in
the
Sun
, of journalism's sewer. Under the headline ‘How Innocence Can Equal Guilt', there were these words:

A group of journalists were to have visited the [explosion] site with the permission of the Iraqi government. Permission was then withdrawn. Mr Bazoft decided to go anyway. He took photographs and soil samples. How was this different from spying? True, Farzad Bazoft would have passed on his information to a British newspaper rather than to the British government. But that would have still been spying. In these circumstances the investigative journalist takes on the role of spy.
⁴⁰

Hugo Young of the
Guardian
was one of the few to reply. He described the
Sunday Telegraph
's ‘scorn for investigative journalism' as ‘matched by the extreme infrequency with which any of them has been known to insert a new fact into the public realm. Investigating nothing, save that which will confirm their unbreakable political prejudices . . . the pride of Tory journalism produced the most weaselling and morally insensate explanation that the Iraqi Government can ever hope to read . . . with a subtext for Western eyes which says that investigative journalism is a punishable offence against the state.'
⁴¹

That a principal function of the press (and the rest of the media) is to limit news and public debate within an established ‘consensus' seems, to me, beyond doubt. For many journalists, Macaulay's notion of a ‘fourth estate of the realm' simply does not apply. But these days there is an added element. It is smear of an especially malicious, spiteful and ruthless strain that varies from tabloid to ‘quality' broadsheet only in presentation. Perhaps Jack Jones was right when in 1984 he warned of a ‘new wave of Goebbels-type methods beginning to spread in our country'.
⁴²
The campaigns against
Death on the Rock
, Arthur Scargill, Salman Rushdie and Farzad Bazoft, to name just a few, were to follow.

Of course, for those newspapers that have no qualms about
their role as state protector and propagandist, smear is a form of censorship; and the aim, if not the method, is the same as it was in Soviet Russia. In this way Thatcher's censorship laws, like the Kremlin's, are promoted and guarded by journalists. In its smear against Farzad Bazoft, the
Sunday Telegraph
likened investigative journalism to an offence against the state. Sadly, it has become just that.

Among belongings of Farzad Bazoft released by Iraq some months after his hanging were several books he had read in prison in Baghdad. One of them was my book,
Heroes.
At the bottom of a page on which I had listed journalists noted for their bravery and sacrifice he had added his own name, and this: ‘Farzad Bazoft of the
Observer
, who tried to tell the truth about a “big explosion” that killed so many people in Iraq, was arrested. Under pressure and fear, he gave a “false confession” and was accused of spying. He's a journalist, too.'
⁴³

March 20, 1992

I FIRST KNEW
John Merritt when we were both on the
Daily Mirror
and he was in his twenties. I remember overhearing an argument John was having with a clutch of editorial executives; he was objecting to a special ‘drugs issue' of the paper, which, by highlighting the victims of heroin rather than those who controlled the trade, came close to voyeurism. He had just returned from Pakistan and knew that the untold story lay with powerful international forces. He put his case with passion and fluency. As a serious popular journalist, he loved his craft and loathed its trivialisation.

This is not to suggest that John was without a sense of fun. The mystery remains, for example, as to who planted the plastic turd that greeted Robert Maxwell and James Callaghan as they stepped out of the
Mirror
's executive lift, causing Maxwell to boom, ‘Who did
this
?' A corporate inquiry, though inconclusive, produced only one suspect.

Certainly the
Mirror
was at its best when it published a John Merritt investigation, whether it was about homelessness or the links between the Tories and the British National Party and other groups on the extreme right. When I was helping to start up
News on Sunday
, I tried to poach him as chief reporter; but he was then on his way to the
Observer
, which became his journalistic home and where he was distinguished as, in my view, the finest reporter of his generation.

His exposé in 1989 of the horrific psychiatric colony on the Greek island of Leros – a political prison during the years of the Greek junta that became a dumping ground for the
seriously ill and inadequate alike – was a classic of its kind. For this, John took the expected fire; he was denounced in the Greek Parliament as ‘a tool of the CIA wanting to keep Greece out of the EC'. After European Community grants to Greece were frozen as a consequence, the worst units were closed down.
⁴⁴
In this business such triumphs are too infrequent.

John then reported on the suffering of refugees seeking asylum in Britain, who were routinely bundled back to places of great danger, sometimes to torture and even death.
⁴⁵
They were Kurds and people from the Horn of Africa and Latin America. Almost all the refugees he wrote about were eventually allowed in. That the Home Office was an accessory to the crimes of their tormentors angered him greatly; it was this edge to his humanity that was reflected in so much of his work.